Anyone else underwhelmed by the new DX 11 graphics?

Nope. In fact, my brother in law likes to walk into my room while i'm playing just to stare at the beautiful graphics for a bit then leave. heh @_@

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Originally Posted by Illya

Tessellation and Parallax Occlusion depend on the resolution of the texture being "bumpified".

The textures in FFXIV must fit in a PS3's 256 MB of VRAM.

This is the result.

Until the PS3 is finally kicked to the curb and the game can be developed for PCs and PS4 with large memory pools, this what we have to live with. The other improvements in DX11 such as lighting/shading and reflections are very nice though.

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Yes, for parallax occlusion mapping. Tessellation on the other hand has nothing to do with the base textures.

Tessellation actually adds polygons based on a "higher order description" of the surface.

As for textures, there is no reason why the PC and PS4 can't have access to the hi-res ones - apart from them not existing.

With regards to parallax mapping, it seems to be a limitation of the technique. Unreal suffers from it too.

https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Deve....html#Parallax Occlusion mapping

The only solution seems to be to "flatten"/reduce the effect as the view angle approaches oblique angles - which SE has done for some surfaces but not others like rocks.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Illya

The textures in FFXIV must fit in a PS3's 256 MB of VRAM.

Until the PS3 is finally kicked to the curb and the game can be developed for PCs and PS4 with large memory pools, this what we have to live with. The other improvements in DX11 such as lighting/shading and reflections are very nice though.

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We've gone down this road before. The PS3 version uses simple/smaller textures than the PC/PS4 version... it has little impact on other builds of the game.

Beyond image quality concerns we also find extensive use of lower resolution textures and normal maps on the PS3 - along with a reduced amount of anisotropic filtering - which further softens the overall look of the game, leaving certain parts of the stylised artwork looking smudged and rather indistinct in comparison to the much cleaner PC version.

Source: Face-Off: Final Fantasy 14 (PS3 v PC)

I only hope there's HD texture for our character mesh.

At least you pc users got an update :P ps4 users got the shaft for now;)

The game in DX9 looked terrible to me to say the least. Wood looked too sterile, like some wooden blocks from ages ago, rock castles looked more like paper props to me. With DX11 that was a huge change for the better. now i can move around towns without cringing hard.

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Originally Posted by Zenif

The game in DX9 looked terrible to me to say the least. Wood looked too sterile, like some wooden blocks from ages ago, rock castles looked more like paper props to me. With DX11 that was a huge change for the better. now i can move around towns without cringing hard.

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Well I hate to mention it (again) but a MMORPG has to use game models that are like 1/10th the complexity of single-player games. (Compare Archeage with single player games made on the CryEngine(3) engine to it's Engine showcase - Crysis 3, and then look at Star Citizen (another MMO...ish game)), the more stuff there is to render, the less complex they have to be. Archeage had pretty good water, but it also dropped the frame rate a lot. The land and player models however were worse than FFXIV in that regard.

FFXIV "scales down" on the PS4 and PS3 with smaller textures and shorter draw distance. That is something that doesn't even get considered for PC-only games. Nowadays, developers keep trying to cram the same game into a 1GB mobile app, that would otherwise take 25GB on a PC.

I'm cheating a bit with downsampling and Reshade, but I, for one, am quite pleased with how my game looks. (Right click -> "open in new tab/window" or "view image" for full size, unless you're using Internet Explorer, in which case get a new browser)

http://i.imgur.com/VhlNDql.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/B6NyX7P.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zUu7J2m.jpg

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Originally Posted by Zyrusticae

I'm cheating a bit with downsampling and Reshade, but I, for one, am quite pleased with how my game looks. (Right click -> "open in new tab/window" or "view image" for full size, unless you're using Internet Explorer, in which case get a new browser)

http://i.imgur.com/VhlNDql.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/B6NyX7P.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zUu7J2m.jpg

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Downsample? I can't even hold 40 fps at my monitor's native 1080p. xD

I see you have added (faked?**) chromatic aberration and altered the color balance.

** Unless I'm wrong, post processing mods like sweetfx don't have access to the depth buffer.

I think they messed up the interaction between tesselation and parallax mapping at some point because a lot of surfaces (primarily rocky surfaces in the Forelands) look very different at different camera angles. Other than that, SSAA with proper scaling of all UI elements would be all I really want. Can't use VSR because the R9 290 can only do 3200x1800 = no perfect scaling. Pretty happy with how the game looks in general, especially the characters.